1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical disk recording and reproducing apparatus and a method for determining optimal power thereof. More particularly, the present invention relates to an optical disc recording and reproducing apparatus and a method for determining the optimal power of a laser beam based on the characteristics of an optical disk in order for data to be optimally recorded onto and read from the optical disk.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, optical disks are classified into typically three kinds of disks: reproduction-dedicated disks such as compact disk-ROM (CD-ROM), Digital Versatile disk-ROM (DVD-ROM), and the like, write-once recordable disks such as CD-Recordable (CD-R), DVD-R, and the like, and rewritable disks such as CD-Rewritable (CD-RW), DVD-RAM, and the like, depending upon data recording capabilities.
An optical disk recording and reproducing apparatus can drive a laser diode (LD) provided on an optical pickup to record information onto an optical disk or reproduce recorded information from the optical disk. In order to record information onto the optical disk, the optical disk recording and reproducing apparatus drives the laser diode (LD) to irradiate a laser beam of relatively high power since the physical characteristics of an information recording layer existing on the optical disk has to be changed. In order to reproduce information recorded on the optical disk, the optical disk recording and reproducing apparatus drives the laser diode (LD) to irradiate a laser beam of relatively low power since the physical characteristics of the information recording layer do not have to be changed.
However, the optimal recording power changes depending upon the characteristics of each optical disk such as the optical disk kind, the optical disk maker, chemical properties of the recording layers on the optical disks, and so on. Accordingly, most optical disk recording and reproducing apparatuses are designed to perform a process for determining an optimal recording power at the initial stage prior to driving the LD.
In general, the optimal power is determined by performing recording tests on a certain area of an optical disk. However, the number of parameters used to determine the optimal power setting is increasing, as well as the number of consumer optical disk recording and reproducing apparatuses that can record and reproduce information onto and from diverse kinds of optical disks. Accordingly, it takes a substantial amount of time to perform recording tests for all the possible combinations of parameter values, so a method is required to solve such a problem.